Trump Administration Boosts Charter School Grant Program
The Charter Schools Program (CSP) is a long-running federal grant program aimed at helping the charter school industry with new start-ups and expansions. It has had some serious problems with waste and fraud in the past, but Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has announced that the program will be getting an immediate funding boost of $60 million.
Since 1995, CSP has distributed about $4 billion. A study by the Network for Public Education found that roughly $1 billion on that had been lost to waste and fraud, including charters that accepted grants and soon closed, or never even opened. A follow-up study found that nearly 1800 charter schools had failed after accepting CSP grants.
Though she was the source of key data for the study, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself repeatedly dismissed the study ('I'm not sure you can really call it a study') and claimed it is just the product of people with a political agenda. Under DeVos, CSP continued to dispense funding.
Under the Biden administration, CSP was subject to new regulations that put some controls over how these taxpayer dollars were distributed. The new regulations included requirements for charter schools to better connect with community needs. New regulations also reduced the likelihood that a charter operator might spend taxpayer dollars on a school that never actually opened. Regulators also set out to limit charters that were only barely technically non-profit but actually operated as profit-making enterprises.
In February the department announced that it had 'reigned in" [sic] regulations and 'federal overreach' of the program.
CSP funding had stood at $440 million annually for the past few years. On May 16, McMahon announced that the amount would be increased to $500 million, not just as part of the budget proposal for next year, but as an immediate add-on to this year's funding for the program.
The announcement does not clarify where that $60 million will come from. The department has not responded to media inquiries about the source of the funding, including an inquiry from me.
The funding bump is in line with the Trump administration's stated support for taxpayer-funded school choice. The next few years will tell just how well those taxpayer dollars will be spent.
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